[Beowulf] BayBUG meeting today, February 20 2007 in Sunnyvale CA

[Donald Becker]

Bay Area Beowulf User Group (BayBUG)
Bi-monthly in 2007, our first 2007 meeting will be

February 20, 2007
2:30 - 5:00 p.m.
AMD headquarters Common Building,
Room C-6/7/8
991 Stewart Drive
Sunnyvale CA

Join us for food and drinks and to learn from and network with other
Linux HPC professionals.

Speakers:
        * David B. Jackson, Chief Technical Officer, Cluster Resources, 
Inc.
        * John Gustafson, Chief Technical Officer, HPC, ClearSpeed 
Technology

Save the date for the next BayBUG: April 24, 2007


Presentation 1
Title: Batch vs. Interactive Scheduling in Clustered Computing

Abstract:

Mr. Jackson will give an overview of batch v. interactive scheduling in
clustered computing. He will discuss how tools can help empower
organizations to fully understand, control and optimize their compute
resources, focusing on the pros and cons of each approach. In
particular, he will address issues of availability and reliability, as
well as its ability to scale to larger systems, more complex problems
and multiple clusters as well as user friendly design. He will then
explore the current landscape of available tools, noting which
considerations users must take into account when choosing resource
managers and workload schedulers. Because of his deep experience with
the Moab Cluster Suite family, he will help users better understand this
popular technology. Then he will make a closer examination of how
popular tools such as Moab can be optimized for particular cluster
architectures, including Beowulf-class clusters.

Speaker Bio:
David B. Jackson, CTO of Cluster Resources, Inc.

David has more than fifteen years of experience in the high performance
computing (HPC) industry. He designed and developed the pervasive Maui
Scheduler and other open-source resource management software, and has
since been the lead architect for cluster, grid and hosting center
management suites (Moab Cluster Suite, Moab Grid Suite and Moab Hosting
Suite).

He has worked for numerous high performance computing centers providing
resource management and scheduling services including Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, San Diego Supercomputer Center, NCSA, PNNL, MHPCC,
and the Center for High Performance Computing. David has also worked as
a consultant at IBM's AIX System Center. A founding member of the Global
Grid Forum scheduling working group and a key member of the Department
of Energy's Scalable System Software Initiative, He has a M.S. in
Computer Science) and B.S.'s in Electrical and Computer Engineering and
in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Presentation 2
Title: Requirements for Successful Use of Accelerators

Abstract:

Accelerator boards offer the possibility of increasing performance on
highly-specific tasks, while economizing on electric power and space
requirements that frequently limit the scale of Linux clusters. We
present the full set of issues that must be considered for successful
use of such accelerators, including software, precision, compatibility,
latency, bandwidth, and memory size. Surprisingly, the applications for
which accelerator boards such as those made by ClearSpeed work well also
tend to be somewhat insensitive to bandwidth to the host node and highly
insensitive to the latency.

Speaker Bio: John Gustafson, Chief Technical Officer, HPC, ClearSpeed

John joined ClearSpeed in 2005 after leading high-performance computing
efforts at Sun Microsystems. He has 32 years experience using and
designing compute-intensive systems, including the first matrix algebra
accelerator and the first commercial massively-parallel cluster while at
Floating Point Systems. His pioneering work on a 1024-processor nCUBE at
Sandia National Laboratories created a watershed in parallel computing,
for which he received the inaugural Gordon Bell Award. He also has
received three R&D 100 Awards for innovative performance models,
including the model commonly known as Gustafson's Law or Scaled
Speedup. John received his B.S. degree from Caltech and his M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees from Iowa State University, all in Applied Mathematics.



-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Software	 			Scyld Beowulf cluster systems
914 Bay Ridge Road, Suite 220		www.scyld.com
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993